I am tight on time, and I’ve had a bunch of homework due, and I have made just enough time to post something this week. I have one last game on the docket: a management style game. This week I built a hotel and wondered why I can’t build anymore after a certain point.

This week is the Hotel Architect Demo.

Hotel Architect is a management style game from Pathos Interactive and Wired Productions. It will be released for the PC sometime in the future.

Step into the absolute chaos of the hospitality industry! If you ever wanted to build and own a hotel, then this is the game for you. You are brand new to the industry and want to get in on the literal ground floor. So take your mentor’s hand and play through a few levels of building and managing hotels.

The gameplay is pretty standard for a management-style game. You are given a plot of land and are tasked with building a foundation and sectioning it off for its specific purpose. At first, building rooms requires a specific size, and once plotted out, it then requires specific materials to finalize the section. Construction workers then show up to work, and depending on how much you pay them, the work will get done, and then you have time to customize the area.

Rooms require a bed, a closet, and a place for the guest to place their luggage, while something like a kitchen requires racks, an oven, a sink, THE WHOLE NINE YARDS.

It is fun to have the ability to fully customize an area like a room with wallpapers and little accents to make the room feel like a livable space for a little legless person on vacation.

Hiring is a puzzle on its own. Most of the time, three potential employees are listed for most jobs, and all of them have quirks (good or bad) that affect their day-to-day. Some may be better at a specific job and worse at others, some may have to take longer breaks, or get more irritable faster than others. It makes for a fun little game of how to maximize your hotel’s efficiency.

Customer reviews and inspections are the way that Hotel Architect invokes a system that punishes the player for being bad at their job, and I think it works well enough. There were obvious things that were wrong with my hotel, but I don’t recall it really hurting my rating, especially when the inspector was present.

There is a research board to allow you to spend more money to unlock more stuff, and the rewards are reasonable and have helped my overall experience of the game.

Hotel Architect is a clean and potentially colorful game, depending on how much you want to get into the customization. I still think the little people, especially the woman who is at the forefront of the tutorial, is creepy looking. They are adorable from a distance.

Hotel Architect’s demo was just fine. It is like any other management game that I have ever played. Get the people in, take their money, and build more stuff to maximize how attractive your hotel looks until you get enough stars to move onto the next level.

It does devolve when I got to the later section of the demo where I needed a gym, and I just threw a bunch of stuff in a small space, and it gave me ok to move on.

Hotel Architect is a fun take on the management style game that doesn’t really introduce a gripping mechanic to set it apart, but it is still a fun experience for a demo.